Lenn Pryor, vice president of Nokia Music, said that Nokia was “happy” with the reception given to Comes with Music in the UK, despite rumours that it has only signed up around 23,000 subscribers since its launch last November.

The Comes with Music service gives users a year of unlimited music downloads to their mobile phone , and the songs are theirs to keep even if they cease to use a Nokia phone. It's currently available on two devices, the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic, which is free on a £25 per month Orange contract, and the Nokia N95 8GB, which is available for free on a £40 per month Orange contract.

“The UK was our first launch market, and we learned a lot from that experience,” said Mr Pryor. “We learned that the right device is just as important as what we're offering. When we launched in the UK, the timing was such that we launched it with two devices that were slightly out of date,” he said.

“That's not really something that helped us in the UK at the time. But we learned from that, and subsequent launches in other countries with the [touch-screen] Nokia 5800, the hero device, are doing very, very well,” said Mr Pryor.

He also admitted that the company needed more retail partners in addition to the Carphone Warehouse to help push the device in to the hands of users.

“We won't give up on Comes with Music, or the UK. We'll be back with the 5800 there,” he said.

Mr Pryor said that British subscribers to the service were “more engaged” than the average mobile phone user, and were consuming music in some unexpected ways.

“Comes with Music users are downloading around 200-300 tracks in their first month,” he said. “Around 90 per cent of our usual sales from the Nokia Music Store are new songs. With Comes with Music, it's the complete opposite. About 90 per cent of those downloads are from the back catalogue, and 10 per cent are new releases. It means people are enjoying music, and they're enjoying the history of music. They're going back and discovering not just one Rolling Stones album, but they're looking at the whole discography.